This Land, Your Land

If you don't have plans for Saturday, there are at least 20 opportunities in North Carolina to participate in cleanup and rehabilitation work as part of National Public Lands Day. There are also guided hikes on the Appalachian Trail and free admission to National Parks as part of the annual celebration.

National Public Lands Day, September 24 this year, is the nation's largest, single-day volunteer event for public lands in the United States. Last year, 170,000 volunteers worked at over 2,080 sites in every state, the District of Columbia and in many U.S. territories.

Projects planned in North Carolina (link above) range from spreading wood chips along nearly a half mile of the Lake Trail at the Carl Sandburg National Historic Site in Flat Rock to removing aquatic debris and collecting water quality data at the Rachel Carson Coastal Reserve near Beaufort, and from trail work in the Nantahala National Forest's Panthertown Valley Backcountry Area near Cashiers and in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, to removing litter and debris at hurricane-damaged Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge near Rondanthe on the Outer Banks.

Opportunities to help also exist at local sites, like Hemlock Bluffs Nature Preserve in Cary and Fairview Park in Hillsborough.

Up the coast from Pea Island, entrance fees are waived for the day at the Wright Brothers National Memorial at Kitty Hawk the only National Park in the state to charge for entry.

Dare County Emergency Management, which the National Park Service refers readers to from its pages, reports that the visitors centers at Wright Brothers National Memorial and Fort Raleigh National Historic Site were to reopen today. (We said below the parks were still closed.)

These two visitor centers were to be open through 5 p.m. and return to regular hours on Wednesday.

The visitor center at Wright Brothers National Memorial in Kill Devil Hills was to reopen this morning after a small fire Wednesday, the National Park Service said Friday.

A fire in an air handling unit motor at mid-morning Wednesday caused evacuation of staff and park visitors from the building. No one was injured, and the rest of the park, including the Wright Brothers Pavilion with interpretive exhibits about man's first powered flight, remained open.

The visitor center's normal hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

A little ways south, the visitor center complex at the Bodie Island lighthouse reopened Thursday after repairs to the entrance road and parking lot at the Cape Hatteras National Seashore site. The complex had closed Monday.

The Bodie Island Lighthouse visitor center is also open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily.